Game Modes Are Severely Lacking In Teamplay. Here's One That Demands It.

[PaleMinerva]

A mode with multiple, simultaneous objectives has much more depth and potential for teamplay than what we have now, especially given the level of enemy AI. 

 

I've been chatting back and forth with xhris about this for the past several minutes, and I think we have a pretty good thing going here. It should fit well with the AI, it has risk vs reward, it's fairly deep and has some interesting mechanics.

 

I call it Assault. I dunno what xhris calls it. It's something like Sanctum's take on tower defense, with some elements from UT2K4's Assault mode.

 

In this mode, the goal is to prevent enemies from moving Object A (a bomb, a superweapon, whatever), to Object B (a cryopod, a loading platform, whatever) through a randomized maze of tiles. Each tile has emplacements for turrets that apply various types of damage to enemies that travel through it - these emplacements are randomized, much like the maze itself. The turrets cost energy to build, upgrade, and refill.

 

Here's the kicker. Enemies don't single-mindedly push A to B. Some will demonstrate such behavior, yes. Others will dedicate themselves to harassing players, and still others will themselves try to rush to B to destroy or take control of it. Once either all the players are annihilated, B has been destroyed or taken over, or A reaches B, the mode ends in failure.

 

Furthermore, A never resets on its own. A concerted effort must be made by the team if they want to return A to its starting position. There are two options for this: players stand in front of A and push it back - it leaves them defenseless, drains their energy, and is extremely slow, but can be utilized in between waves - and as long as they're pushing, enemies can't move it forward. When a player runs out of energy, however, they can no longer push. The more players that help, the faster it moves. Meanwhile, enemies will attack the players and Object B.

 

Of course, the alternative is faster. This other effort will temporarily separate the team from each other and the objectives. For example, maybe there's four separate hackable consoles in four different tiles that must all be activated at once in order to move a crane. Once all four players have hacked their consoles within, say, 10 seconds of each other, the crane will begin to move and drag A back to its starting position.

 

Even as this is happening enemies are still pushing A or attacking B. And on top of that, they have a new target: the crane. If that crane is destroyed, players must repair it before it can be used again, much the same way players would push Object A back.

 

Obviously, this is a wave-based sort of thing, and there will be significant time in between series of waves for squads to plan out their actions. The more waves a squad lasts, the harder it gets, the better the reward, etc.

[iexbrood]

seems fun, new modes are definitely needed.

[PaleMinerva]

seems fun, new modes are definitely needed.

It's less that new modes are needed, though they are. More that modes that are actually interesting to play, maybe even a staple game mode that defines and is the core of the game, are necessary.

Edited July 1, 2013 by PaleMinerva

[ectoplex]

Pale pretty much explained it all really well

I just want to go into detail about this aspect of the game mode:

 

A concerted effort must be made by the team if they want to return A to its starting position. There are two options for this: players stand in front of A and push it back - it leaves them defenseless, drains their energy, and is extremely slow, but can be utilized in between waves - and as long as they're pushing, enemies can't move it forward. When a player runs out of energy, however, they can no longer push. The more players that help, the faster it moves.

 

As it states above, one option to move Object A back is by actively pushing it back, however, the players won't be physically pushing the object like a car that's out of gas - Instead, I think it would be more fitting if the players/Tenno were to stand at a certain distance away from the object and channel their collective energy, through meditation, into a sort of psychic energy which pushes the Object A back.

 

To give you an example of how this meditation stance could look like, if you've played any Oddworld games, I'd like to think it would be similar to how Abe meditates (minus the chanting) which he uses in order to take control of enemies or open up portals to free his companions (image below)

 

Edited July 3, 2013 by xhris

[LilDisaster]

it's a good idea.  However, it seems somewhat complicated.

[PaleMinerva]

It's hardly complicated. The core of it is basically Tower Defense. Build towers, kill things, protect objectives.

[theammostore]

I like it. what's better is if you make it an Alert mission (not exclusive, just part of the alert system) then it'll really help give this universe a feeling of things happening. Yanno, like, all of a sudden the Grineer are starting to really really push on a cryopod location, so you need to fight them off, or the Infested are sending a large swarm at a supply line.

[Mhak]

Reminds me of a certain game-mode in Global Agenda where one team was tasked with protecting a large bomb as it slowly made its way across the map, as an opposing team did their best to stop them. To advance the bomb, a team would have to be very close to the bomb, and have cleared away all enemies from it - the bomb wouldn't advance if there were enemies next to it.

 

It was more of a PvP game-mode but I think it could work well enough if modified to have a team of Tenno trying to clear heavy weaves of enemies while also protecting and advancing the bomb (ow whatever the object would be). There'd be a time limit, so with enemies swarming the bomb it would be a challenge to kill or keep them all away as it advanced.

Edited July 2, 2013 by Mhak